30 East 20th Street

                                                                                 917-838-0827

By John Mariani

        Open just two months, Nemesis took off from the first night and has been packing them in ever since for some very exciting Asian food you won’t find anywhere else and more resembles the kind of tantalizing street food found in the night markets of Bangkok and Taipei.
        The name may be a tad off-putting, given that nemesis means an archenemy, but the owners—Rudi Jan, Renk Dong, Jane Rotari, Nick Hwang and Alexander Lee, with executive chef Francis Tanrantana powering the kitchen—say it is meant to convey in some way that their restaurant is “coming back with a vengeance” after Covid.
        No matter, the reception and staff is very friendly and they very much care what you think of the unusual food. Thai-born Tanrantana, previously at Nowon and Tong in Brooklyn, has a deft hand with seasonings and heat and takes requests seriously. He has a lot of surprise in store for the adventurous gourmand.
        This goes for beverage director Nick Hwang’s exotic cocktails. (One snafu when we visited on a night when the bartender was overwhelmed was that our cocktails took a half hour to arrive, after food was on the table.) The atmosphere is warm, live plants plaster the brick walls beneath a skylight, and the rear room can get loud only because of the people enjoying themselves, but by nine o’clock things quiet down.

        Everything is meant to be shared, and portions are large indeed, starting with some Asian tapas items. The menu is Pan-Asian but the focus is on Thai delicacies with regional underpinnings. Most unusual are the spiced corn ribs ($14) that are really corn cobs with a cilantro-tamarind glaze. I tried to eat the cob—wrong move! —learning to gnaw the kernels off the cob. 

        Tiger prawn lumpia is Filipino derived ($17), the large shrimp stuffed with chopped pork in a spring roll wrapper on a bed of banana ketchup. I hadn’t expected to see skate on such a menu and was happy it was, as a sambal of marinated fish, roasted with a glaze ($32). This time I was correct in eating the crackling fish bones on the dish that provided a snap and unexpected texture.         Jungle chicken thigh is richly spiced and tinged by turmeric ($18), simmered in consommé with soy sauce and chili, and, if you like beef tongue, Nemesis’s version is out of the ordinary, marinated in Thai spices with a cabbage slaw ($22). It’s a bit chewy but very good. I crave shumai dumplings and those made here with tiger shrimp, masagon shiitakes, corn and chili ($16) are steamed and juicy.

         I loved the crab fried rice ($32) of Alaskan snow crab fried with aromatic spices and a fried egg with spring onions and Thai seafood sauce, and even after helping myself to two heaping servings, there was plenty to take home. One cannot fail to have noodles in an Asian restaurant, and we ordered the “drunken” noodles ($25), pad kee mao, a very spicy and filling street food.

         “Crying tiger steak” ($39) packed a real punch as a grilled skirt steak that had a pleasing chewiness to it, lashed with chimichurri and served with crisp fingerling fried potatoes. 

        The desserts, like flan and cheesecake, are not memorable.

        New York now abounds with similar Asian restaurants in every borough, but none so unique in showcasing unusual dishes cooked with care and respect for a tradition that is now setting in to the city’s foodscape.

Open for lunch and dinner Tues.–Sun.; brunch Sat. & Sun. 

         Katie Cavuto was attending a First Mass—novus ordinatus—the joyous day when a new priest is ordained and celebrates his “marriage” to the Catholic Church. There, under the white Gothic arches of Our Lady of Mercy in the Bronx, with the strong smoky scents of incense billowing into the air from a jangling brass thurible, four young men, dressed in white linen albs, prostrated themselves at the altar as the choir sang the beautiful and solemn Jesu Dulcis Maria.
         After ordination, the new priests gave their blessing to the parishioners assembled at the altar railing and in return they kissed the palms of the priest’s hands. From that moment the new priests vowed to serve God and his people in the calming, comforting, beneficent spirit of Jesus Christ.
       

        Katie Cavuto, who grew up in the north Bronx, knew one of the newly ordained priests, Joseph Evangelista, her second cousin. They’d gone to the same parochial school and then attended Fordham University, she as a history major, he in theology. When he joined the Jesuit novitiate, Katie was pursuing a career as a journalist, and by the time she was in her early thirties, she’d become an award-winning investigative reporter for McClure’s magazine.
         At the reception, Father Evangelista was mobbed by friends and colleagues, and it took a good half hour for him to break away and spend some time with Katie.
         “You look exhilarated,” she said.
         “I really am, Katie. And exhausted. I’ve been studying and praying for this day for more than ten years now. I’m almost thirty-five and I’m just now feeling I’m at the beginning of a career.”
         In fact, an aspirant seeking to be ordained a Jesuit begins with a two-year novitiate, then a three-year period of graduate studies in philosophy and theology, apostolic work in his neighborhood, three to five years of Regency, when he teaches or joins a mission, then Tertianship devoted to studying the documents of the Society of Jesus, finally leading to ordination.
         “So where do you go from here?” asked Katie.
         “I’ve been assigned to Sacred Heart School to teach.”
         “Sacred Heart? Up in New Rochelle?”
         The new priest laughed, “A little farther away. It’s a grammar and prep school in the Philippines. It’s been there since 1955 to serve the Catholic Chinese-Filipino community in Cebu City.”
         “So you have to learn Chinese and Filipino?”
         “Maybe. Actually, I’ve been taking Chinese for the last two years, Filipino is similar, I’m told. They also speak Spanish, which I’ll probably pick up fast.”
         “It’s a boys school?”
         “Yeah, K through twelfth grade. It’ll be a challenge.”
         Katie knew that Joseph had always wanted to teach, though she assumed it would be on the college level.
      “I always figured you’d be teaching Theology or Philosophy right here at Fordham,” she said.
         “I hope I will someday, but my superiors—and I agree with them—feel it would be of benefit to both me and the students at Sacred Heart if I began my ministry there.”
         “When do you, uh, ship out?”
         “End of September. Till then I have more language work to do.”
         “So I get to see you all summer.”
         “If there’s time left in my schedule.”
      “We can just go right here to Mario's," she said, referring to an Italian restaurant dating back to 1919 in the vibrant Little Italy section of the Bronx where Fordham University was located.
         “I think maybe we should go to Chinatown, so I can practice my Chinese,” said her friend.
         “Whatever you say.”
         “Actually, it’ll probably be a while before I get back to the U.S.,” he said. “Maybe years. I’ll probably come home to find you married with two kids.”
         “I’m not sure that’s in the cards, Joey. I’m not against the idea, but my career’s gaining steam and even now I never have enough time even to see my friends. We’ll see.”
         Katie had been very close to Joseph since they were children and by the time he was fourteen he seemed destined to go into the priesthood.  Now he had realized his dream, and it suddenly dawned on Katie Cavuto that it would be a very long time before she saw her childhood friend again. The way things sometimes went in the Catholic Church, maybe never.
        

                                                                      *                         *                         *                     

         Five years later, in the Year of the Millennium, Katie had not married, though she’d been involved off and on with a lawyer who had more than once proposed.  Men did not fail to find her very attractive—five-seven, a good figure (even if she hated her hips) and light brown eyes that seemed to balance a heritage through a bloodline that came from both the North and South of Italy.
         Katie was certainly not opposed to the idea of getting married, but her life as an investigative journalist had sent her off on stories that occupied her for weeks or even months, sometimes outside of the country. And on three occasions, she had almost been killed on the job.      
         On all of those assignments she had been accompanied by an ex-NYPD detective named David Greco. whose experience, insight and intuition had been invaluable. It had been several months since she’d seen David—not since the publication of her last article that he’d been involved with—and now, losing her friend Joseph Evangelista to the priesthood and the Philippines, Katie felt she’d been remiss in not keeping in closer touch with David, who after retiring from the force had moved to a small house on the Hudson River.
    In the meantime Katie had been writing stories for McClure’s, where she was a true star on the masthead as “Chief Investigative Correspondent,” having won several awards for her coverage of stories that had involved a hunt for gold stolen by mobster Al Capone, the sale of a painting by Jan Vermeer that exposed the deadly underbelly of the international art world, and the hunt for the man who inspired the character of Harry Lime in the film The Third Man.
    No assignments of such front-page importance had involved Katie since that last one, but she had broken stories about corruption in the city’s health inspection department and another about price fixing among certain airlines. She’d done solid work on both—without David Greco onboard—and her long-time editor at McClure’s, Alan Dobell, let Katie pretty much pursue her own interests.
         Still, she craved the kind of actual adventures she’d been on with David, which at the very least had gotten her out of New York and off to cities like Naples, Moscow, London, Budapest, Vienna and Taipei—all at the expense of the magazine. The fact that each project had begun benignly enough then developed into crime stories that put her in grave danger had a titillation factor to it, but she couldn’t ever imagine going out on such an assignment without David, both for his cop’s knowledge and his protective security. As a journalist, Katie fielded scores of tips and ideas for stories that might have easily found a place in a daily newspaper like the New York Times or Washington Post but didn’t “fit the needs” of McClure’s, which was named after a respected muckraking magazine of the turn of the century that had once published authors like Willa Cather, Jack London, Mark Twain, and Lincoln Steffens. The original McClure’s went out of business in 1929, but a wealthy Canadian publisher who believed in a passion for solid investigative reporting titillating enough to sell to a large audience started up the new McClure’s in 1990 in homage to the mission of the first. Katie had been one of Alan Dobell’s first hires.
         Katie felt she might have made a good war correspondent at one point but now, in her mid-thirties, it was too late to start. Plus the fact that the United States hadn’t been involved in a war since the Gulf War in 1991.          Now, nine years later, with the exception of support in a few international civil wars, there were no war fronts involving Americans to cover.
         When she allowed herself to indulge in fantasizing about the “big stories,” she’d sometimes call David, just to get together and talk about all they’d been through. Usually, he’d drive down from his home on the Hudson and meet her and they’d go out to dinner, usually to a place in the Bronx, so he wouldn’t have that far to drive on the way back.
        Yet on recent nights out Katie thought she and David were just going over the same stories and memories, laughing about how they escaped getting killed and how the endings of the stories were always a surprise they had not seen coming. 
         For his part, David missed going off on such adventures mostly because he didn’t get to see Katie enough in those interim when there was no story to pursue.  In his mid-fifties David no longer held any romantic notions about Katie and his relationship—hell, there never had been any romance in it—but he felt retirement had slowed him down, leaving him to tend to his house and land, still trying to beat back the ever rampant giant hogweed on his property and finding himself going to bed earlier and earlier, waking up early too, which he’d vowed never do after he left the police force.